Java News from Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Sun has released JFluid 1.3.1, a profiler for Java that can profile "an arbitrary subset of a program that can be changed on-the-fly, while the program is running. This is a capability not available in any other profiling tool for Java at this time." JFluid relies on a unique dynamic bytecode instrumentation mechanism and thus only can run on a specially modified HotSpot VM.

Rahul Kumar's Raining Sockets is an open source (LGPL) framework for writing servers based on
Java 1.4's non-blocking I/O. "Even the New IO model offers a low level interface to non-blocking IO which is not easy to master, despite all the information and books available. Raining aims to give a high level interface to the user, so that NB IO (NBIO) can be plugged into applications without worrying about details, bugs, proper handling of buffers/selector/channel/events etc."
With Raining Sockets the client
simply subclasses a single class that
that contains complete non-blocking I/O code and overrides
a few methods to customize the operations that process the data.

3DChat.org has released Java XTools 1.16, an open source
collection of enhanced functions and features for Java 3D. It includes an enhanced BranchGroup Node; object loaders for Renderware .rwx files, Caligari TrueSpace .cob and .scn files, and Alias/Wavefront Maya .obj and .mtl-files; a light-object for a visible light using a lensflare-like effect; RotationInterpolators for combinations of the X-, Y-, and Z-axes, a text to texture converter, a ByteArrayReader, and caching data download classes.
XTools is published under the GPL.